"By now you have likely read all about the features announced for Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" thus far along with seeing plenty of screenshots and videos showing off Launchpad, Mission Control, Versions, the improved mail client, and much more. But how does Apple's next-generation operating system perform? Well, here is a look at the performance of Mac OS X 10.7, including what are likely the first public benchmarks of Mac OS X Lion."

ZFS is a very nice file system, with some amazing features. I do think that ZFS is more appropriate for a server rather than desktop machines that Apple focuses on. Something like XFS or possible BFS (the BeOS/Haiku FS) would be very nice for OSX.

I think all the multi-volume / disk management features of ZFS would add a lot of overhead, at least in terms of memory for a desktop with most likely a single disk.

And which of those features that HFS+ lacks are really important to Apple users? I'm assuming it's not integrated LVM or dedupe. Apple have full volume encryption, and implemented snapshot-like functionality with time machine rather than filesystem snapshots. So what are the features that users really want that are missing?

Also, note that features tend to move inversely to performance. This thread started about performance, and now we're talking about features.

1: Performance - unfortunately its really hard to make this quantitative as HFS driver for LInux sucks and xfs / ext3 ... driver for OSX runs in user space, so comps I made were running the same program in OSX, then re-booting to Linux. Anyway, just about everything was faster in LInux and XFS, such as file creation/delete/move and compilations.

2: Journaling is an afterthought. Look at XFS which is designed

3: possibly subjective - but HFS+ is much less reliable than ext4/xfs in the face of bad sectors. I've had sector problems on HFS+ disk on two separate occasions and lost just about everything. When I had sector problems on ext4 disks, lost almost nothing.

4: designed in a different era: HFS+ is basically HFS with journaling. HFS was designed for MacOS 7 or 8 around 1995. Compare this with XFS which was designed by SGI for SGI workstations. XFS design meant to maximize durability and high performance for Irix workstations with fast 32 bit processors and lots of memory. HFS was designed to run acceptably for low memory 680x0 systems.

XFS was also developed in the same time frame. Your 3rd example is a invalidated by you leaving the dates for XFS out. XFS came out in 1994, so it was designed in the exact same era. It was open sourced in 2000. This makes both filesystems the almost the exact same age.

Also, the 68030 and 68040 are both 32bit chips, and the 68040 is no slouch in the speed dept (though admittedly, not as fast as the r8000, that came out in the same timeframe as IRIX 5.3, the first version to have XFS)